Planet13 - 5:48 am on Nov 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

Anyway, a question: Are you seeing a lot of newly found "direct" traffic that you didn't have say a year ago too?

Yes, but my direct traffic (and referrals) has always been real low. So for this year, compared to this time last year, here have been the changes in terms of traffic patterns:

* 10.29% Direct Traffic
Previous: 6.93% (+48.35%)

* 20.10% Referring Sites
Previous: 12.54% (+60.30%)

* 69.61% Search Engines
Previous: 80.53% (-13.55%)

This seems odd for a couple of reasons:

1) I am pretty sure that our email newsletters have been caught in the junkmail filters for both hotmail and gmail accounts. I get lots of people telling us they never got our emails, so I would suspect that direct traffic SHOULD be down significantly.

2) We have been trying to work on SEO, and apparently we are going in reverse, since GA says that search engine traffic is headed south.

I can understand referrals going up, because we only started doing any facebook this year. But still, 20% seems pretty high for us.

In comparison, for fourth quarter 2009, our traffic sources looked pretty much the same they have always looked, namely:

* 6.33% Direct Traffic
* 11.19% Referring Sites
* 82.49% Search Engines

I think that GA might be messed up...